


jedikiller

by brophigenia



Series: that boy is a monster [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Canon Compliant, Fantasies of World Destruction, I'm being torn apart, Kylo Ren Backstory, M/M, nongraphic cauterization of a wound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 02:29:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10981470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: take the mask offwhen you speak to me.





	jedikiller

**Author's Note:**

> Heyyyy, it's me again.  
> Am I sorry about this? Yes.  
> Warnings for unwise medical practices involving unsanitary makeshift cauterizing devices, killing of Younglings, mentions of the Hosnian system, Snoke being Snoke, and beejays. Because why not? Comment and tell me how I should be ashamed of myself.

_my peace has always depended_

_on all the ashes in my wake_

Ben Solo is made-up from the very beginning.

When he is eight years old, the boy learns that the name _Solo_ is one given to Corellian foundlings and orphans, to the unwanted and alone children of that world who have no surname of their own.

When he is nine, he learns that the name _Ben_ was an alias used by Obi Wan Kenobi after the rise of Darth Vader. It was a hiding place, a sad and worn out thing like the sand-battered caves the man himself dwelled in for years and years, drowning in cowardice and injured pride and cryptic mutterings.

This makes a lot of sense. He is nine when he realizes that Ben Solo is a name not for a boy of flesh and blood, but for an idea, something that might have been but was not. The boy came into the world squalling and furious and was never a new hope for his parents. He was a new trial, a new war to fight. Maybe one to lose, this time. They look at him like he's a ticking time bomb. His father looks at him and sees black plastisteel and hears the ominous thud of outdated prosthetics against metal floors and he is so afraid of fucking up this kid. _His_ kid.

His mother looks at him as if he is already dead and gone, sadness in every line of her face, when she bothers to look at him at all. She curves a hand around his cheek to whisper his name mournfully like a funeral dirge and he is never happier than when bedtime comes and he's allowed to go to his room to talk to the Voice.

The Voice is always there, as long as he can remember. At least since he was four standard years old. The Voice is a constant in his life of political upheaval and assassination attempts and _Ben put that down and sit down somewhere I don't have time to play your games I've got to get this bill done for the vote this afternoon_. The Voice must be his inner self, because it knows so much about him. It knows everything. And its words are so soothing, so calming.

When he's fifteen years old and knobby kneed yet, he endures yet another round of hissed _sith sith sith_ taunts from the other Younglings and another meal eaten alone in a corner hunched over his food with no lightsaber on his belt. When he's fifteen years old his body rises in the night to slaughter all twenty seven of his uncle’s pupils, all of his fellow Younglings. He wakes to his chest heaving with effort and blood everywhere and an ancient relic of a lightsaber in his hands, crackling magenta-blue.

He looks around at them and feels mild relief beneath the horror and revulsion-- at least now, no one will ever expect him to be good again.

There is a transport for him, waiting.

The Supreme Leader is withered in body but all-powerful in the dark side of the Force, and everything he teaches the boy makes so much sense-- freed passions, freed anger and joy and fear. Freed bloodlust. He trains the boy for three years in a cave on a wasteland of a forgotten planet that is suspiciously well-stocked and -staffed by food and medical supplies and velveteen throw blankets and sneering yet awed walking skeletons just beginning to find their color and weight again.

The Knights of Ren are not the Supreme Leader, who emphasized meditation and saber forms and lucid dreaming and talking about all of his hurts and disappointments. They are five, until the boy comes to them, and then they are six and all a writhing mass of pleasure together. Under the Knights he becomes a man who understands pleasure in all of its forms-- fighting, fucking, lying still and quiet and alone, drinking thick red wine until his vision swims, screaming to the top of his lungs and destroying everything in his path. He realizes that his body can be something other than a torment, a list of embarrassments to be made fun of for. He becomes a whole new creature.

He becomes Kylo Ren.

When he returns to the Supreme Leader’s side, he sends his Knights to wreak havoc on the Resistance as they will; he splinters off into them and they into he and it is nothing like a hive mind and everything like that; he does not know how he ever survived with less than six hearts beating in his chest at a time. He still feels _empty_ even with their presence-- how had the boy lived without this?

The ship is hovering in a hangar. _The Finalizer,_ a shiny toy for the Supreme Leader’s shiniest trophy boy, his prodigy General who Kylo has only heard whispers about, and by no one who would have had firsthand knowledge of the man.

Armitage Hux is nothing like he expects, from the beginning, and Kylo feels as if he’s been battered backwards by a killing blow the second that his eyes clap onto the General and his frosted eyes and the way the Force roils when he moves, the way it curls around him and tries to steer him this way and that. The dark side of the Force sees in him all the chaos the world has to offer, all the fury that comes from a life lived only to survive for spite and future destruction. He is the dark, and Kylo is _undone._

He speaks to hear the man hiss back in fury; he lives for the moments when Hux gets so angry that his faux-Coruscanti slips, when the bones of him show through the skin and his teeth bare around rough Outer World curses. He destroys comms and slashes great big holes into Hux’s steel-wrought pride and joy so that he can feel the echoes of Hux’s hands twitching into fists at his sides from rooms away, all loathing. He brings Hux gory trophies of war, Stormtroopers with blood spattered on their armor and video communications logs of his lightsaber slashing through any enemy of the First Order he can reach.

He thinks about Hux’s speeches and laughs until his sides ache, thinking of the way the other man extols the virtues of order when all he wants is to watch the galaxy burn to the ground.

He grows up, writhing inside, caged and starving even when he’s gorging himself full of sensation and sustenance and emotion.

He kills his father. The girl gets away. He almost dies.

Hux drags him through the snow, white faced and angrier than anyone in the whole universe has ever been angry. It pours from him in waves, and is what gives Kylo enough strength to make it to the transport Hux has waiting, what lets him solder closed his own gut wound with a piece of hot metal and co-pilot the thing, knocking a Stormtrooper out of the way.

It is another year before he resumes his place on the Finalizer.

 _Starkiller,_ the Force whispers constantly in his ears, _destroyer, annihilator, murderer. Murderer. Starkiller._ (It doesn’t mean him.)

Kylo does another press up, sweat pouring off of his skin to drip audibly onto the slick floors of the training area in his quarters. He doesn’t use the officer’s training area. He prefers the silence, the oblivion, the _darkness_ of his quarters, walls slick and black as per his specifications, lights set high in the ceiling, everything at the same time dark and luminous.

_Starkiller._

He feels the draw to the light even still. His father— _Ben’s father_ is dead, he is irreversibly irredeemable, and yet the light still tugs at him, crueler than anything else has ever been. _I can’t,_ he wants to scream aloud, tearing at his own hair. _I can’t, can’t you see? I am this; I am darkness. I am this. I will only ever be this. Han Solo is dead. Ben Solo is_ nothing. _I am. I live. IamIamIam._

Would he choose this path again? Every night before he goes to sleep he counts them; he doesn’t know all of their names but he remembers their faces as they died. He remembers every single one of them in order, starting with Ben’s kills. _Jedikiller,_ the whole galaxy calls him in whispers still, as if he hasn’t killed far more than the twenty seven Younglings his Uncle had collected years ago. He recalls every one of their faces as they died, looking for meaning in the widening of their eyes, for redemption or satisfaction in the noises that their bodies produced without their conscious consent.

Was there ever any other path for him? Was he ever going to be anything but _this,_ Kylo Ren, bloodsoaked and always tortured, even whilst he was the torturer?

_Starkiller._

His shaking arms finally give out; he has lost count of how long he’d been doing press ups. He rolls onto his back, damp all over and shivery from the cool air touching his sweating skin. His chest heaves with exertion. The press ups came after working through all of the forms he knows with his saber. He allows himself a half-second of respite (of weakness) before he rolls to his feet and calls his saber to his hand again. His arms are numb and his fingers do not want to wrap around its hilt. This is good, because even half-blind and swaying on his feet with sweat stinging his eyes he needs to be able to work through the weakness of his flesh and become one with the force, allow it to flow into his screaming limbs and guide him to victory.

 _Do or do not, there is no try,_ the Force says in his uncle’s voice, hushed, right in his ear.

The corridors are deserted when he stalks through them at 3:15 BST, empty save for the skeleton crew of troopers assigned to the late patrol. He strides past them and pays them no mind; they are all one buzzing being to him, unless he concentrates. He knew the Traitor because his mind was separate, running on a different frequency than the hive’s from that night in the village.

 _Ben, come home,_ his mother’s voice echoes in his mind. In the dream, she was small like a child and older than he’d ever seen her, tucked up into a little bunk in a room bare of personal effects except for two flickering holoportraits on the desk like nightlights. Her hair was still long, but gone gray and thinner than it had been when Ben was small. He had once delighted in running his fingers over the ropes of braids that hung nearly to her knees when she didn’t have them coiled up and pinned elaborately to her skull in the traditional fashion of a planet long-destroyed. She whispered to herself _Ben, come home,_ like a mantra, until she was asleep, and even then her age-lined mouth continued to twitch as if she was still speaking, only too soft to be heard.

He increases his pace, hood up. He wears no mask now, not since completing his training. His master forbids it, though it is a sacred thing for the Knights of Ren, the assumption of anonymity to truly embrace the full pleasure of passion unchecked by the constraints of identity and society. His master tells him that his face is one of their greatest assets, recognizable and all the more fearsome for it.

Still, he is uncomfortable showing his face, especially when he isn’t sure what can be gleaned from it, aware of his own vulnerabilities, tired half out of his mind and thoughts strung through with images of the element-battered ruin that was once Leia Organa.

The authentication pad on the door demands both handprint and nine-digit code. He types in _645542368_ and the door unlatches, whooshes open softly for him.

The only light in the antechamber comes from the dim bulbs set into the edges of the floor on either side, illuminating the path to its resident’s private quarters. He walks in and the body on the bed stirs a little, completely aware and awake.

He does not speak; he never speaks. Instead he shrugs out of his cloak, drapes it over the back of the desk chair in the corner and toes from his boots until he stands sock-footed on tiles that are the same as the ones in his rooms, slick and black. His steps are soundless as he goes to the bed.

 _Starkiller._ He wraps his naked hands around trim, bony ankles and slides them up, up, encountering no resistance in the way of fabric. The sheets are easily twitched back with half a wish, half a thought. The thighs that his palms find are muscled and lean, a distance runner’s thighs that match the compact and wiry glutes he knows are currently pressed against the mattress. The hair on them scritches his skin pleasantly and he makes sure to notice the way it sounds and feels, opening himself up to feeling, making himself aware of every nerve ending in his body and in his astral awareness.

He swallows Hux’s cock down; it’s already hard, blood hot and thick and the perfect size to make him choke. Hux knows what to expect when his door opens at this time of night. Hux may not understand exactly what is going on, but he’s amenable enough to the arrangement. He twines his fingers into Kylo’s hair, tugs harshly but not cruelly, and each time he chokes, Hux strokes soothing fingers over his temples, wet with tears, overcome with sensation. He breathes, and Kylo seeps into his mind without meaning to, watches the flashes of memories rolling over the backs of Hux’s eyelids. He sees himself, furious and visibly aching and strangely beautiful in his savageness. He hears the steady ticking of a clock, a reminder of the orderliness of this life, the perfect punctuality of everything. He feels the memory of unrestrained and vicious excitement as lips that are not his own form the word _fire!_ and eyes that aren’t his own watch the Hosnian system be destroyed, all at his behest.

Kylo closes his eyes, opens them to the darkness and knows that if he could see, he would see a constellation of freckles on Hux’s pale and bone-protruding hip. Hux comes with a gasp when Kylo lets him hear what the Force calls him, half admiring and half reviling.

_Starkiller._


End file.
